Friday, July 10, 2009

Fat Idenitities

I love me my forums - dims and ff - a lot of the conversations there have contributed a lot to who I am today. Dims can get controversial - simply because it has many feeders and feedees onboard. I've enjoyed it though. I've gone from being judgmental - yes - I was judgmental *hides head in shame* - to kinda,sorta maybe getting it. And realising that, like all fetishes,its not about my getting it - its not about me at all. So ja, I've learnt a lot there since signing up on the forums in February.

New lesson learnt: I've found out that I'm not fat enough to participate on one of the boards there - the SSBBW board. BBW = Big, beautiful woman. Its not used much outside the plus community cos most people tend to mock it and what it stands for. I hate using the phrase outside of the fat community. SSBBW = Super sized big beautiful woman. I always thought I was SSBBW. I'm always the fattest person everywhere I go. I've explained before - fat is a class issue here so people my age who move in the circles I move in - which tend to be wealthy, professional and very white - just arent as big as i am. But even when it comes to going home and being around older bigger women, I'm still pretty damn big! LOL! I'm 1,49 meters and 111kilos. Doctors call me obsese - the fuckers. So how am I not fat enough to participate on this board???

The argument is that the board is exclusively for women who are 450 pounds and above - don't know what that is in kilos. I'm trying to understand why. I thought we were one fat community, that there were lessons we could all learn from each other, ways we could all enrich and shape each other?? Was I sleeping the day in class that that was explained?? I confess I was kinda ...hurt? I don't know what I felt - but it wasn't the warm and fuzzies. I'm sure that wasn't the intention but I was kinda taken aback.

It got me thinking bout fat identities though. I've met girls and women who have told me about how fat they are - most of them from Europe - when in my country they are beyond average - in fact they are considered to be thin girls!!! LOL! I started paying attention then to perceptions of weight. On South African television most of our news readers are what the US categorizes as plus size - i.e sizes 12 and up. In fact most of the black news readers are a size 16 and up. The women who act on our soaps and dramas are often a 10 or 12, some a 14 or 16. There are the ridiculously skinny ones - and those are celebrated and applauded and worshipped cos they've achieved supreme skinniness *eye roll* but for the most part the famous women in my country would be considered plus size. That means that my perception of super sized is seriously supersized. For a girl to be considered a fat girl in my country and in my eyes you have to be BIG! Add to that the fact that girls with big asses arent considered fat where as in the rest of the world a booty automatically seems to make you a BBW, and you've got an intensely different world view than the one found in the Western world.

Now after I find out I wasn't fat enough (still so surreal!!) to be on the super sized board I realised how unfair some of my comments have been to 'smaller' fat girls. I mocked their fat experience and that's not right. Because in my head they are thin doesn't mean that where they come from they haven't been discriminated against, laughed at, or had fat experiences similar to my own. One of the girls I've met on the forums who is Asian often speaks of how growing up in Singapore she was 'that fat girl' She was abused and laughed at and censured and she lived that fat experience. Now she's in the states people keep telling her to get over it or shut up cos she's not fat! It was eye opening. It also opened my eyes to how some SSBBW may feel when a supposedly regular BBW like myself (LOL! I'm still getting over that) tries to claim their experience. The sad thing though is that I believe it is a shared experience, no matter how big or small you are and no matter the category you fall into.

I posted on facebook today how shocked i was that for the first time in my life I was excluded from something cos I'm not fat enough hahahahahahahaha! Those were, I swear to the God, the oddest words I've ever had said to me. It was like I'd entered an alternate dimension where I was thin - regular even! I just thought to myself - where the fuck were you 15 years ago - I'd have loved to hear that then. Now, well - it just felt like one more person telling me how my being different made me not good enough and not wanted. That sounded incredibly lame and oh woe is me but at the time I heard that thats what it felt like.

So ja, my fat identity has an undergone a bit of an extreme makeover LOL!

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